SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 18, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Yandex Does What Google Can’t: Provides Bitcoin Exchange Rates
How much is one US dollar in UK pounds? Google will give you a direct answer to that and many other currencies with the conversion tool that’s built into its search results. But when it comes to Bitcoin, Russian-based Yandex seems to have won the honor of being first to support conversion of that currency. […]

Google Launches Improved URL Removal Tool For Third-Party Content
Google has released an improved URL removal tool that the company says was specifically designed to improve the ability to remove third-party content from its search engine. John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced the change on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google’s long had this tool, and how exactly it has been improved wasn’t made clear. […]

Google’s Matt Cutts On Search Spammers: “We Want To Break Their Spirits”
In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the hosts Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. In one question, Matt explained that Google aims to “break the spirits” of spammers in order to encourage them to change their course of […]

Report: Google PLAs Deliver 4X Revenue Lift For Retailers In Early Holiday Season
It’s probably not too surprising to hear that retailers have doubled their year-over-year spend on Google product listing ads this holiday season thus far. After all, the paid format of Google Shopping had just rolled out in the fall of 2012. What is stunning, however, is the four-fold increase in revenue that retailers have realized […]

A Look Back On One Crazy Year Of Link Building
If 2012 was the year of Google Algorithm updates — Moz counted 37 big ones compared to the 15 in 2013 and 21 in 2011 — 2013 was the year that link building suffered from a serious identity crisis. It was sidelined, stretched, swindled and spit back out again more times than your average SEO […]

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